A few weeks ago, we asked for the OSNews community to help with some questions we were going to ask Aaron Griffin from the Arch Linux team, and the response was glorious and somewhat phenomenal. We added those questions to our own and sent them on over, and then we were surprised by receiving not only Aaron Griffin's responses but answers from various individuals from the team.

Well of course I am not suggesting that application developers build for every distro. There should be a move away from the shared library system or at least a standard library base that distros follow.

But then you lose the whole point of different distros.

Different developers and users prefer a different model of package deployment. Hense the reason ArchLinux exists in the first place (I trust you read the interview?)

"* FOSS software doesn't just run on Linux. There's *BSDs, OpenSolaris and even a few non-*nix OSs out there that also run FOSS software.

It also runs on Windows and OSX and yet in those cases only needs to be built once and the binary will work for the life of the OS.
"
You can distribute Linux binaries too - so in that respect, Linux isn't much different to Windows.
It's just there's usually little point in distributing stand alone binaries as package repositories do all the leg work for you.

"
* and the users to have enough knowledge to differentiate between safe packages and malware.

That is a problem that doesn't require the shared library system to solve. You can have a safe repository of any type.
"
That makes little sense. A repository /IS/ a shared library system.
Plus I thought you were arguing that you don't need safe repositories....

"Sometimes the Windows model works - sometimes it doesn't. eg

It's also the model that OSX uses and it has far fewer headaches than ye old shared library system. Applications still break in Linux from library updates which typically requires command line meandering to fix . That's unacceptable for the general public.
"
Now your talking about a completely different topics.
(plus repositories / package managers SOLVE dependancies issues which often break systems rather than causing them as you suggest).

The command line dependancy has nothing to do software repositries what-so-ever!! (and more importantly, 99% of the time you don't need to touch the command line - it's just many experts advice users to dip into it as it's quicker and easier to list a number of commands to run than take screenshots of the GUIs that need to be used.
Most linux distros give you the CHOICE of using a command line or a GUI. You DONT have to use the command line, but sometimes it's just easier to explain on a forum than trying to navigate someone around various windows and menus.

The benefits from the shared library system such as a safe repository and application index can easily be added to an independent library system along with significant productivity gains.

So what you're suggesting is to replace one software repository with another!?
Plus you're still missing the point that sometimes packages need to be tailored specifically to that distro.

But don't worry most people in Linux land are like you and defend ye old shared system that was designed to save hard drive space in an era when gigabyte drives didn't exist.

Software repositories have nothing to do with disk space savings!
Do you even know how they work? Have you actually ever used a package manager?

They exist to centralise applications, automate deployment and ease system administration.
ArchLinux could use as much diskspace as Windows if you wanted it to. It's just many ArchLinux users don't see the point in installing surplus applications that they're never going to use.

I don't want to get into a platform war (you like what you like and I like what I do) - but please at least understand how a system works before attempting to draw comparisons.